Sixteenth-Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch (review)

Michael Lynch retired from the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh in 2005; and this hefty, handsome, and meticulously edited volume is a tribute from his friends, colleagues, and former students to his impact on the study of Reformation Scotland. Its eighteen chapters cover what the editors call the long sixteenth century, from 1500 to 1650, but there are only three contributions relating to the period before the Reformation of 1560 and three on the period after the Union of Anglo-Scottish Crowns in 1603. The book’s core is the four decades immediately following the Protestant Reformation and serves as the focus of twelve chapters. This is perhaps an accurate reflection of where Lynch’s own interests primarily lie, as is the fact that very few of the contributions are essays in urban history as such—the field in which Lynch initially made his name with his magisterial work on Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1981). Rather, the book reflects Lynch’s more recent interest in the royal court, and its significance to Edinburgh in the reign of James VI, as well as the interdependence of political, religious, and cultural history and the ways in which each can illuminate the others.

Perhaps not surprisingly in a collection of this kind, the quality is uneven; some of the chapters are decidedly slight, while others lack analytical depth. Yet there is still enough substance to the volume for it to be of real interest to historians of the period. It opens with Steve Boardman and Andrea Thomas exploring from different perspectives the emergence of a Scottish “Renaissance Monarchy”’ in the reigns of James IV and James V, and the theme of court culture is picked up again in later essays on the reign of James VI where Maureen Meikle discusses the coronation of Anna of Denmark and Amy Juhala Edinburgh’s role in bankrolling the royal court. In similar vein, there is a particularly effective essay by Theo van Heijnsbergen on the poet Alexander Scott and the courtly and urban cultures that greeted Mary, Queen of Scots on her return to Scotland in 1561. More straightforwardly politico-religious are Ruth Grant’s reassessment of the background to the Anglo-Scottish alliance of 1586 and Julian Goodare’s very convincing chapter arguing that the so-called Edinburgh “riot” of 1596 in fact amounted to an attempted coup d’etat. Other contributions to the religious history of the period include David Ditchburn’s compendious look at pre-Reformation pilgrimage, Sharon Adams’s reassessment of the conference at Leith in 1572, and Jane Dawson’s illuminating examination of the social as well as the religious ramifications of the fifth earl of Argyll’s marital problems. Nor is Catholic survivalism ignored: Rod Lyall and Michael Yellowlees contribute essays respectively on the Catholic poet and activist James Halkerston and the inveterate Jesuit plotter William Crichton. But among the most innovative chapters on religious themes are Alan MacDonald’s fascinating study of the unlikely friendship between Andrew Melville and Patrick Adamson, and Jamie Reid Baxter’s study of the early-seventeenth-century literary world of the well-educated and well-connected Andrew Boyd, bishop of Argyll.

Boyd’s was a world of clerical politics as well as clerical culture, and the issue of kirk-crown relations is addressed more broadly by Jenny Wormald in what is the most wide-ranging and thought-provoking essay in the book. Wormald uses a discussion of the Five Articles of Perth to question recent interpretations of the extent to which James VI and I pursued genuinely British policies in the two decades after 1603 and whether or not he left his son an irretrievably poisoned ecclesiastical chalice. Finally, although urban history is not well represented here, there are essays by Pat Dennison on the persistence of Robin Hood...